The Samaritan high priest raises a Torah scroll at Sukkot, the feast of Tabernacles, on Mount Gerizim near Nablus. Samaritans ignore their more dogmatic rules. Photograph: Baz Ratner/Reuters

✒I have been meditating on the Church of England's decision not to allow female bishops, or rather on their decision not to allow female bishops in spite of the fact that a large majority of the General Synod voted in favour. God may move in a mysterious way, but not half as mysterious as man.

Since I am not a believer, it ought to be none of my business. But the church is not just any old sect: it is woven into our communal life, which is why even agnostics and atheists like to get christened in church, marry there, and are often laid to rest there. The Queen is the head of the church, and MPs – voted in by Christians, non-believers, Muslims and people who call themselves Jedi Knights – have the power to overturn the church's decisions. In this country we believe religion is too important to be left to the religious.

If you want to see steaming resentment, you should ask an old-fashioned C of E vicar about evangelicals. Forget John Major v the Eurosceptics, or Neil Kinnock against Militant. This is real hatred. I recall a vicar saying, with curled lip, that he had been to a happy-clappy service at Holy Trinity, Brompton, in London. "At the end they asked, 'hands down anyone who'd like coffee after the service'."

After the news of the bishops emerged, I did what I always do in times of trouble – consult not the Good Book, but a good book. This was Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer, a collection of obituaries from the Daily Telegraph, the paper that first started printing warts and all descriptions of the dead. My eye was caught by Yosef ben Ab-hisda Ha'abta'ai (literally known to his friends as Joe Cohen). He was the 124th high priest of the Samaritans, not the people who talk despairing souls out of suicide, but the original Israelite sect, as in the parable.

They are a very strict group and only a few hundred remain. Samaritan men are allowed to marry ordinary Jewish women, but if a woman were to leave and marry a Jewish man, the punishment would be stoning to death.

But they don't do that. They just ignore their strictest laws and leave the woman alone. Quite simple. There might be a lesson for the C of E there: it's only the word of man that is inflexible. The word of God means whatever is convenient at the time.

✒ Intriguing how the language changes, not always for the worst, but usually. Bruce Kirby writes to say that he gets his phone service from TalkTalk. It's essential because he cannot get a mobile signal at his house. But the TalkTalk service went down at a particularly difficult time last month. His mother had just died and he needed to make many urgent calls.

So he borrowed a neighbour's phone and called the TalkTalk helpline. They said it would take five days to restore the service. Bruce explained the situation, but far from expressing sympathy, the man at TalkTalk told him there was "no escalatory pathway". The more Bruce pleaded, the more the bloke on the other end repeated the line about an escalatory pathway. By this time I would have hurled the phone against the wall.

On a tube the other day, the driver, an impatient young woman from her voice, got angry about people trying to get on while that horrible screeching noise – "eek, eek, eek", like the shower scene in Psycho – was sounding. "The chimes are a signal that the doors are closing!" she barked at us.

The chimes? "Chimes" is a lovely word. The chimes of freedom. "We have heard the chimes at midnight," said Falstaff. How can it have been usurped by this hideous racket?

And these days everyone – including Ed Miliband in the Commons this week – seems to have adopted the American pronunciation of either and neither. Wrong. As the song has it, "you say ee-ther, I say eye-ther." But a lost cause, clearly.

✒I've had some kind replies to my brief series of very simple recipes. Here's one I made last weekend. Pheasant is incredibly cheap at the moment, and you should be able to get a brace from a fishmonger or butcher for less than the price of one chicken. Two birds will serve three or four people.

Boil some cheap red wine in a casserole and add a bit of stock. Brown the pheasants and put them in. Brown some onions or shallots, plus some bacon bits if you like. Throw in mushrooms and carrots too, and garlic if you fancy. Put a lid on the casserole, boil up again, then cook on a low heat for an hour or so till the pheasant is nice and tender. Could not be easier, or tastier.

✒ I don't want to bang on for ever about Peter Morrison, the drunken paedophile whose incompetence brought down Margaret Thatcher, but your stories keep coming. This is from Christopher Gordon, who got it first hand. Morrison, while he was a minister, needed to get a train at St Pancras. Traffic in London was completely stalled, and his civil servants persuaded him, very unwillingly, to get out of his ministerial car and on to the tube at Leicester Square. They forced their way into a packed carriage. "Christ, it's full of people!" Morrison complained. "Let's get out at the next stop and move to the buffet car!"

✒Baffling label sent in by Margaret Crawford: she bought a small Dimplex heater to guard against frost. "Reading down the long list of 'important safety advice' I learned it was 'not suitable for animal breeding purposes'."

Simon Hoggart's new book of sketches, House of Fun – 20 Glorious Years in Parliament, is available from the Guardian bookshop, reduced from £14.99 to £9.99. Simon will sign personal dedications on a sticky label if you send him an SAE via the Guardian.

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